He currently serves on the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance Task Force.

Before joining EFF, Dave wrote for alt weeklies in every state along the southern border, reporting on everything from Texas death row to San Diego Comic-Con. He has moderated dark-horse presidential debates on public access TV; organized digital media on barely legal road rallies; performed spoken word on a British art-rock tour; revealed human-rights abuses in Ghanaian refugee camps; and uncovered embezzlement that ultimately put a New Mexico elected official behind bars. His investigative reporting on incarceration in San Diego County was honored with the Youth Law Center's Loren Warboys Unsung Hero Award and the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement's Contribution to Oversight Award. He has also won top honors from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia and the Society of Professional Journalists San Diego Chapter.

Deeplinks Posts by Dave

For more than a year, EFF has been investigating how police in California misuse the state’s law enforcement database with little oversight from officials. An investigation published by the Associated Press today shows that abuse of law enforcement systems is a nationwide problem. The AP’s investigation analyzed records from...

It often feels like everyone inside and outside the government agrees that over-classification of government records is a major problem. Yet a series of Freedom of Information Act requests by EFF has found that even when Congress allowed agencies to offer cash rewards to government employees to be less secretive...

From cell-site simulators in New York to facial recognition devices in San Diego, law enforcement surveillance technologies are spreading across the country like an infectious disease. It’s almost epidemiological: one police department will adopt a new, invasive tool, and then the next and the next, often with little...

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) sent shockwaves through the prisoner rights community in April when it announced a new policy forbidding inmates from participating in social media. The memo, distributed in English and Spanish within prisons, read: [O]ffenders are prohibited from maintaining active social media accounts for...

Note: The updated datasets are now located on our California Database Catalogs hub. As of Oct. 4, 2016, the spreadsheets on this page will no longer be updated. A team of over 40 transparency activists aimed their browsers at California this past weekend, collecting more than 400 database...

Join us as we tweet at Gov. Jerry Brown that he must sign A.B. 2298 to protect the privacy and civil liberties of hundreds of thousands of Californians who have been caught up in the state's flawed CalGang gang affiliation database. CalGang is a joke...

Imagine if local governments were like restaurants, where you could pick up a menu of public datasets, read the names and description, then order whatever suits your open data appetite? This transparency advocate’s fantasy became reality in California on July 1, when a new law took effect. S.B. 272...

When EFF analyzes state legislation regulating the operation of drones, we look for a few elements. How will the bill affect law enforcement use of drones? And how will the bill impact private drone use, whether for recreation, journalism, or innovative new business applications? Will the legislation protect the public...

EFF’s team of fearless lawyers defends your rights on the frontlines of technology and the law, from police stops on the street to arguments in the courtroom to the halls of government where policies are ground out. EFF’s latest hire, Criminal Defense Staff Attorney Stephanie Lacambra, is a fierce...

There's an action movie cliché in which a cop inspects the body of a felled assassin or foot soldier and discovers a curious tattoo that ultimately leads to a rogue black-ops squadron, a secret religious sect, or an underground drug trafficking ring. The trope isn’t entirely Hollywood fantasy, but the...